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Web shoppers using baskets as wish lists: survey

While 87% of online shoppers abandon their shopping baskets, the majority plan to return to websites later to complete their purchases, with baskets effectively used as wish lists.

According to a basket abandonment survey from Amaze, 74% of respondents said they would return at a later date to make a purchase, and many are using the basket as a means to ‘window shop’ on e-commerce sites.

The report suggests that, since there is little that etailers can do to change this behaviour, then less emphasis should be placed on abandonment rates as a measure of success or failure.

There were differences in the types of products that shoppers stored to buy later. Clothing and computer products were more likely to be bought straight away, while baskets containing books and music were often abandoned:

So what can e-commerce sites do about abandonment?

Saving basket contents for future visits, and making it easier to resume the purchase may
make it more likely that customers will come back and also use the feature for research.

Clearly display prices and delivery charges on product pages so that shoppers don’t have to add items to the basket to find out this information. If customers are reaching the shopping cart and then abandoning due to
delivery costs, then this suggests that this information has not been made clear or that charges are too high.

Add user reviews and ratings to help uncertain customers make a decision on a purchase there and then.

Offer collect in store options. Sometimes people want items more quickly, or are simply researching online for offline purchases, so making this easy for customers can pay off. Both Halfords and Argos have boosted their multichannel revenues recently by offering such services.

Email customers that abandon baskets. By adding items to shopping carts, customers have shown a possible intent to purchase, so a reminder email, possibly with the added sweetener of a discount may be enough to get shoppers to come back and finish the purchase.

Having experimented with various ways of linking out, it looks like the BBC may finally be using good old hyperlinks to send readers to external websites.

This was spotted by techchuff, via Twitter, which remarks that the ‘Google juice is being sprayed like champagne at an F1 podium’, and indeed, the links appear to be passing on PageRank, which hasn’t always been the case with the BBC.

Display advertising may get a bad rap for its lack of click-throughs, but one way to increase clicks is by making the advertising more interesting. And a new play by browser plug-in Cooliris is trying to do just that.

Cooliris is a browser extension for media viewng with a very shiny and slick interface. But the company also offers a way to access its content in a browser through display ads. And it is a product that has the potential to get web publishers very excited.

While other online advertisers struggle to sell off their content, Cooliris’ summer ad inventory was completely sold out by July.

Online game company Evony may not like the negative attention it has garnered online recently, but the company is about to get a lot more scrutiny after filing a libel lawsuit claiming defamation by the U.K.’s Guardian newspaper and gaming marketer Bruce Everiss.

Evony recently drew media attention for a series of racy online ads. The multiplayer game may not have a lot of scantily clad women its game, but over a series of weeks, the company increasingly relied on semi undressed females in ads promoting itself online, eventually just cribbing pics out of lingerie catalogs and putting links to its site next to cleavage.

The company’s methods led The Guardian to write an article titled “Has Evony become the most despised game on the web?” The company’s owner took none too well to such allegations and has since sued for libel. Taking advantage of the country’s favorable libel laws, Evony filed the suit in Australia. But while suing down under may have legal advantages for the company, it is only going to bring increased scrutiny on their business methods. And that is not likely to be a good thing.

Could Swedish-based Spotify be making the case for ad supported music online? Perhaps.

While other digital music startups struggle with copyright fees and broadband charges, Spotify is making friends with major music labels — and helping them bring in revenue.

The head of Universal Sweden told a Swedish publication this month that Spotify now makes more money for the label there than iTunes. If those numbers are accurate — and can expand to reach other parts of the world — they could represent the silver lining the music industry’s been looking for. And go a long way toward explaining how Spotify sweet talked the labels into giving the company access to stream such extensive catalogs online for free.

According to a newly-published study published by Pew, nearly three-quarters of Facebook users polled said they didn’t know that Facebook generates and stores data about their interests and traits, and, when they came to learn this, over half indicated that they were uncomfortable with Facebook’s practice.

Mastercard, the third-largest credit card processor in the US, has announced a new policy that will make it more difficult for some businesses to automatically convert free trials into recurring subscriptions.